This invention relates generally to thermometers and improvements therein and more particularly to electronic thermometers which perform calculations or similar operations upon temperature data.
While some prior art electronic thermometers are capable of performing limited data conversions such as conversions from one temperature scale to another; while some conventional electronic thermometers allow for limited data storage and recovery such as maximum or minimum temperatures; and while certain conventional electronic thermometers have capabilities of limited data derivation such as detecting and holding in a display a temperature curve peak, none known to the inventors of the device described herein have achieved incorporation of all these capabilities in enhanced forms into a single-unit general purpose instrument.
Conventional thermometers which have selective data conversion functions either limit such conversion to two switch selectable scales or require internal hardware alterations or adjustments to achieve selection of an alternative scale.
Prior art thermometers which incorporate data recovery and derivation features fall into one of the two following categories:
instruments which must be interfaced with ancillary equipment, either data collecting devices or data processing equipment, in order to achieve such capabilities, PA1 instruments with minimal data recovery or data derivation capabilities.
Devices in the former category result in elaborate and expensive thermometric systems which require sophistication on the part of the user. In addition, these instruments pose portability problems due to the bulk of such systems and are therefore unsuitable for general use. Devices in the latter category also have restricted application due to the limits of their capabilities--limits which dictate that the user make many necessary observations, comparisons, or computations in order to derive or collect commonly useful or required information. Such a requirement is wasteful of the human resource and often results in lost data due to the inability of the user to monitor the device at all times or to perform the necessary comparisons or computations in the required time or with the required accuracy.
Prior art digital electronic thermometers must either make trade-offs between precision of temperature resolution and width of range--such trade-off being necessitated by the limits of the number of bits of resolution of the analog to digital converter used, or they must employ more sophisticated analog to digital converters the result of which is more expensive and generally less portable instruments.
The primary object of the invention described herein is to provide an electronic thermometer having improved selective data recovery, data conversion, and data derivation capabilities in an embodiment that is less expensive, more portable, more efficient, and easier for the untrained user to operate than conventional thermometric data collection and processing systems.
It is a further object of this invention to embody the above in a device incorporating high accuracy and high resolution over a wide range of measurable temperatures.